I desperately hope Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium inspire more RPG devs to reject the traditional drip, drip, drip of DLC and expansions

Videogames are the weirdest of mediums. For lots of reasons, really, but this weekend it’s DLC and expansions that I’ve got in my sights. An opinion piece about DLC, how novel! I know, I know, but lately there have been a few high profile games refusing to go down the DLC and expansion route, and this novelty really reinforces how strange it is that games drawing out their stories for a year or longer has become the expected, done thing.

Anyway! The concept of new storylines and even epilogues being slapped onto our adventures months or years after release is not just normal, it’s a long-running tradition that’s outright expected—especially in RPGs. Over the years, BioWare alone has released 40 DLCs and expansions—and that’s only counting ones that include meaningful story additions, so not shops like Dragon Age’s Black Emporium or packs that just include weapons or skins.

It would seem bonkers almost anywhere else—aside from tabletop games, anyway. If we watched a re-release of Return of the Jedi where it wasn’t just CGI tinkering but an hour-long post-credits scene where Luke flits off to Space France to open up a vineyard, we’d all leave the cinema thinking “Well, that was pretty odd”. Because it really would be pretty odd.